"It's filled with
the filmmaker's
rage and despair over the Persian Gulf war."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A very powerful war drama by indie American filmmaker John
Gianvito,
made before 9/11. It's filled with the filmmaker's rage and despair
over
the Persian Gulf war and its dire consequences in America and across
the
world. Gianvito, a resident of Cambridge, Mass. (where he is Associate
Curator of the Harvard Film Archive), sets the film in New Mexico, in
1991,
and mixes a fiction story with one of reality (using CNN clips of the
Gulf
War). It follows the lives of three powerless New Mexican characters,
who
all suffer greatly due to the events of the war.

Fernanda Hussein (Thia Gonzalez, the only professional
actor in the
cast, who is an NYU grad who majored in drama), the titled character,
is
a young Mexican-American woman who is separated from her Egyptian
husband,
who returned home because he couldn't find work. She has a 14-year-old
daughter and a nine-year-old son. Because she has the last name of the
Iraqi dictator, her house is vandalized (a sign says 'Arab pigs go
home').
When her two children fail to return from school one afternoon, the
bigoted
police are not helpful. Later, through a psychic (a real psychic), her
children are found brutally knifed to death and dumped in the Rio
Grande.
The police have the audacity, without proof, to think she committed the
crime and hold her in detention for a few months.

The second story involves Raphæl Sinclair (Dustin
Scott), a
high school student who is influenced by his radical teacher to become
an activist against the war and is conflicted with his conservative
pro-war
father. Raphæl can't take living at home anymore due to the lack
of communication and joins the ranks of the homeless. He finds that his
former comfortable middle-class existence is a thing of the past, as he
joins the struggling artist and pacifist communities. In the film's
most
optimistic moment, Raphæl is collecting signatures outside a
local
festival for the Green Party and some of the crowd is responding.

The last story tells of a Mexican-American returning marine
from
the war, Carlos Sandia (Robert Perea), who loses his factory job, has
difficulty
relating to his girlfriend (Elizabeth Pilar), and is haunted by the
trauma
of the killing fields and the senseless atrocities of the war. Carlos
grows
increasingly irritable and withdrawn, avoiding people, parades and
victory
celebrations. He also has an unusual rash that no one diagnoses, though
we later learn about the Gulf War syndrome and its devastating effects
on too many veterans.

There are many slow pan shots across the barren desert
landscape
and close-ups of the displaced Iraqi, Naseer Shemma, one of the world's
most distinguished musicians, playing very moving pieces on the oud
(lute).
In one piece he uses only one hand as an homage to those who lost their
limbs. In another set, he pays tribute to those 400 or so innocents
killed
in Iraq when the Americans dropped cluster bombs on a shelter
containing
children and women. The film records at length the real peace activist
group based in Santa Fe, called People for Peace (still active today),
as they meet and earnestly discuss their aims. One member of that
group,
Ann Dasburg, is filmed reenacting her actual one-woman candle vigil in
downtown Santa Fe on one of the coldest nights of the winter. The film
ends at a fall outdoor festival called Zozobra. It's a Spanish word
that
approximately translates as unease. Once a year, since the 1920s, a
giant
effigy is burned to start a three-day fiesta. The locals refer to him
as
“Old Man Gloom.” At the communal burning the audience taunts the
gigantic
ogre puppet at the stake, who is then lit up in flames with fireworks
passing
overhead and the frenzied crowd (with many of them drunk) chanting
“Burn
him! Burn him! Burn him!”. It's a contemplative last shot aimed
at
exposing the daily hidden violence in this country that seems so banal
but has a lingering effect on why we might be such a war-mongering
nation.

This is one of the better indie films; it has a fresh, raw
and incisive
quality in depicting a history lesson that is necessary, provocative,
relevant
and thoughtful. The passion the filmmaker has for the cause burns
deeply
within the undistributed film, that is head and shoulders above most
distributed
films I saw in 2001. It's ironical to see it after the almost universal
feelings of the futility of W.'s follow-up Iraqi War and when some
still
think the first Persian Gulf War was a smashing victory except for not
taking out Saddam Hussein. What this film intended, is for us to
understand
that the war was filled with all sorts of hypocrisy about doing it for
democracy and the people. If that was true for Bush I's war, I imagine
it goes double for W.'s folly.